Since Version 3.5.10, the JavaParser project includes the JavaSymbolSolver. While JavaParser generates an Abstract Syntax Tree, JavaSymbolSolver analyzes that AST and is able to find the relation between an element and its declaration (e.g. for a variable name it could be a parameter of a method, providing information about its type, position in the AST, ect).

Using the dependency above will add both JavaParser and JavaSymbolSolver to your project. If you only need the core functionality of parsing Java source code in order to traverse and manipulate the generated AST, you can reduce your projects boilerplate by only including JavaParser to your project:

How To Compile Sources

If you checked out the project from GitHub you can build the project with maven using:

mvn clean install

If you checkout the sources and want to view the project in an IDE, it is best to first generate some of the source files; otherwise you will get many compilation complaints in the IDE. (mvn clean install already does this for you.)

mvn javacc:javacc

If you modify the code of the AST nodes, specifically if you add or remove fields or node classes, the code generators will update a lot of code for you. The run_metamodel_generator.sh script will rebuild the metamodel, which is used by the code generators which are run by run_core_generators.sh Make sure that javaparser-core at least compiles before you run these.